Adobe PDF (see also Text documents) offers support for 3D content within the documents. Although PDF is very easy to open without special software and is in itself suitable for visualization; storage of the data in optimum quality quickly leads to very large files that require a lot of memory to be opened. Moreover, 3D data cannot easily be exported from a PDF for reuse within 3D applications. That is why the format itself is not suitable for long-term archiving.

PDF is a non-preferred format for file type 3D.